


Demonology

by Neffectual



Category: World Wrestling Entertainment
Genre: Demon Hunters, Demons, Established Relationship, Knifeplay, M/M, Serial Killers, Violence, sort of
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-09-22
Updated: 2017-02-17
Packaged: 2018-08-16 19:02:28
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,031
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8113879
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Neffectual/pseuds/Neffectual
Summary: There’s nothing like a neat clean up to get Roman’s dick hard, and this is nothing like a neat clean up.Partially inhuman demon hunter Roman heads out for the usual call - put the idiot who's been eating humans down, and head back for date night before his lover lets the bed get cold. It never works out like it does in the movies, does it?





	1. Silver

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Randomosities](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Randomosities/gifts).



> Fair warning: I have no idea what this is or where it's going. Or what anyone is. Sorry.

There’s nothing like a neat clean up to get Roman’s dick hard, and this is nothing like a neat clean up. The alley he stalks into stinks of piss, ten-thousand-dollar Italian leather stepping into puddles of god-knows-what in this filthy place, but then, it’s not like he doesn’t have another three identical pairs back at the house. Bones crunch underfoot, too, and the drizzle soaks into his thick wool coat, leaves his sleek, curly hair a dew-slicked mess, the dark locks turning black and sticking to his scalp. Despite the mess, his dick is pressing hard against the pants of his immaculately tailored suit, and he’s suddenly glad that he attends these little outings alone, now. Once upon a time – well. What the big bad wolf doesn’t know won’t hurt him.

Roman allows himself a little smile at that, reaching up and loosening his tie; Italian again, red silk, the one that looks so good tied up so neat against his throat and even better dangling around his wrists as he lies in a ragged heap in the bed. He reaches into his pockets and pulls out black leather gloves, the kind Antonio says they only make for the mafia – and he should know – tugging them on, finger after finger, left hand first, covering a shining platinum band studded with a single diamond. He’s always wanted two, but for a time, one has done the trick well enough. The second gloves goes on just as easily, each one made for him, and fitting as perfectly as the aphorism goes.

There’s a low growl, barely on the edge of hearing, but Roman’s been doing this for long enough that he can hear these little things. When he hears him, Roman grimaces, biting back a wince as the smell of ammonia hits his nose, but under that, the thick scent of decaying flesh. Typical. They always call him out for the hard ones, the ones where someone’s been allowed to go dark and feral, to fall into a trap that no one can break out of. There’s the sound of a rattling chain, too; the office told him on the phone that they’d collared this one before, but he’d managed to get away. Roman sighs. He hates the messy ones – but oh, how he loves the messy ones.

The man he’s looking for is crouched in a knocked-over dumpster, in a pose Roman’s deliciously familiar with, one he gets every night at the end of the bed, and it makes him harden further in his suit pants. The man staring at him doesn’t look like anything Roman would let into his house, though, soaked in mud and blood like he’s stopped bothering to wash between kills. And kills, that’s what he’s been doing, that’s why there’s bones crunching beneath him when he shifts his weight, eyes never leaving Roman’s face for a second. Roman doesn’t bother to look at the bones, knows they’ll be a mix of human, animal, and demon; whatever this scavenger could find, Roman doesn’t give a shit what he’s been killing, only that it’s come to this. Calling the best agent away from his one night of freedom a week to put the rabid beast down.

The man snarling at him from behind a mask of blood and dirt isn’t unattractive, Roman’s not blind to that, as he dips back into a pocket for a silver-bladed knife, something he tries not to touch unless he’s wearing his gloves. He’s got long, long dark hair, curling around his face like a mane, even in the rain, and there’s a few pale blonde hairs towards the end of one side that suggest he once sported some bleach – maybe a streak, maybe just tips, who knows how long it’s been since he saw a salon. He’s naked, and his body is like one of those gym-addicted boys Roman sees lifting weights on the pier; possibly there’s something not entirely white behind the golden brown to the skin that peeks out from between the dirt, because there’s no tan lines Roman can see, that bronzed colour trails all the way down. He’s got a thickness to him that’s thoroughly delicious, broad thighs and shoulders, a thick neck. His dick hangs limp between his legs as he crouches, but it’s not over-large, sitting high and forward, like a present. He growls again, and Roman shakes himself out of it. This isn’t what he’s here for.

Most of them prefer to use guns, but Roman’s never got away from the joy of blades, the sing of it as it slices through flesh. A bullet hole through the skull might be efficient, and clean, but there’s nothing like removing the heart from a body to reassure you that it won’t be getting back up, and the weight of a knife has always felt so good in his hand. Besides, there’s something fair in it, he feels, much more fair to get close and give the pitiful creature a chance at killing him, too. Just because one is naked and muddy and the other spends two hundred dollars a time on socks doesn’t make them all that different, and one day, if it’s Roman like this, he hopes his team have enough mercy in them to put him down in a fair fight. He hopes they’re as sure of themselves as he is, because to face something like this, something feral and barely sentient, with nothing but a blade? You have to know you’re the best.

He walks closer, flicking the knife open with a little ‘zing’ noise that makes the man lose focus for a second, eyes moving to the knife and away from Roman’s face before their eyes lock, blue-grey with brown, and Roman sees his pupils dilate as the only warning before he springs. Roman catches him with the blade, an arc of red across his chest as the man scrambles back and away, howling in a way that’s not entirely human, but not entirely animal either. Roman, for his part, wipes the knife clean on the sleeve of his coat, and promises he’ll bemoan the fabric later.

“See, if you’d kept yourself to animals, we might have had another month before I had to leave date night to massacre you,” he says, coolly, and dives forwards again. This time, the other man doesn’t move, just stands there, waiting. Roman pauses with the knife inches from his throat, the fatal cut – probably a mistake, but he just had to know. “Anything left in there?”

“Shield,” the man says, so quiet that Roman almost thinks he doesn’t hear it.

“What?” he asks, flatly, pressing the knife in, ready to slice if the answer isn’t what he wants.

“Shield,” the man says, again, and this time Roman definitely hears it. “Shield, shield, shield, shield….”

He continues muttering, but Roman’s already flicked the knife shut and shoved it into his pocket, is pulling his coat off and wrapping it around the man’s bloody, filthy form.

“And this is why we’re not meant to work alone,” he says, dryly.

 

* * *

 

The heavy oak door creaks open, footsteps on the floorboards, one, two, three – and there’s a knife at Roman’s throat, keeping him back against the hallway wall, painted a vicious crimson that Roman thinks would look fairly interesting with fresh blood smeared on it. It’s just not something he’s going to try today.

“Hello gorgeous,” Dean grins, slicing his lover’s top button off deftly, a testament to his skill with a blade and the sharpness of the knife, although Roman can see Dean’s hand shaking a little, which means he’s using the silver set, and they’re already starting to burn. He leans forwards and lets the blade press in for a moment, then Dean lets the knife drop, and leans over the bundle in Roman’s arms to kiss him soundly. It’s passionate but unhurried, like Dean knows he doesn’t have to rush any more, and Roman savours the soft lips of his partner. “Now, what the fuck have I told you about bringing your work home with you?”

Roman smiles like a shark smiles at prey, and leans forwards again for another kiss, his husband pushing him back easily, with one hand.

“Been picking up strays,” he says, voice quiet to stop the man he’s carrying from waking. “You know me, it’s a bad habit.” And Dean does know, know what it’s like when Roman gets it into his head to save something, rather than put it down like he’s been told.

“Meal, or toy?” Dean asks, and snaps his jaws like a hungry puppy, making Roman smile. He’s brought bits and pieces home from cases before, but this is the first time he’s bringing a whole person back to Dean.

“Neither. One of yours, I think.” Roman says, quietly. “He said shield.”

That stops Dean in his tracks. Before there was the agency, there was Shield, and while Roman wasn’t brought in on that, he knows that when they came apart, everything was pretty messy. Half the operatives had to be slaughtered, and half lost their minds. No one’s ever said if those two halves were different, or had some overlap, but Roman’s aware that Dean was part of it, a long time ago, and that he sometimes still has nightmares about the deaths of his partners, the way that they were slaughtered indiscriminately once they’d served their purpose. When Roman had found Dean, he’d been part of a clean-up crew in the old Shield buildings, and Dean had come at him with a knife. It’s still Dean’s favourite way to greet him, and Roman would be lying if he said he didn’t love it, that it didn’t make the blood sing in his veins to have a lover so sweet and dark and dangerous all at once.

When he’d first come across Dean, dirty and snarling, shouting the name of the organisation at him, Roman hadn’t been sure what to do, other than disarm him and pin him down to be slaughtered, but when he realised the man burned at silver just like he did… he’d hidden him, and come back with food, and a blanket, baby wipes, and bandages for the wounds on his hands. And Dean had surprised him by being pretty eloquent once he’d drunk two bottles of water and scarfed down a ham sandwich. It had been barely any time at all before Roman had brought him home and let the stranger wander his house, taking an hour long bath before coming out to find Roman napping on the bed. Roman had woken up with both his hands tied to the bedpost with his own neckties, and his own knife set at his throat, Dean staring down at him, steadily, as the knives burned welts into his hands. The kiss had been unexpected, but Roman would be lying if he said it had ever been unwelcome.

Now, Dean carefully takes the bundle from him, carrying the sleeping man, wrapped in Roman’s coat, into their sitting room. Roman takes a moment to bemoan the clean, cream linen of the couch as Dean settles the filthy man onto it, but it’s not like he can’t get another just like it. Pulling Roman’s coat away, Dean sees the man’s face for the first time, and sucks in a breath.

“Fuck,” he mutters, and then leans in, lifting a section of the man’s hair, the bit where Roman had spotted the bleached ends, just barely hanging on. “Seth.”


	2. Ruby

“You know him.” It’s not a question, Roman barely needs to ask questions where Dean’s concerned; even if he hadn’t mentioned a name, he would have known that Dean recognised the man. It’s all in the way Dean’s body moves. He forgot so much in a year, the year the Shield were destroyed, and one of the parts of human society he’s never got back is how to hide his reactions. Well, Roman amends, in the privacy of his head, he’s never got used to hiding himself where Roman’s concerned. Which can only be a good thing. “Who is he? Is he safe to have in the house?”

“Don’t be a fool,” Dean says, without looking up, and tucks Roman’s coat ineffectually around Seth’s body, trying to preserve some idea of modesty, or keep him warm. The warmth is more likely, as Dean’s been known to wander around in the back of Roman’s conference calls stark naked, guzzling beer or eating chips. Roman’s not entirely he sure he understands what modesty is, after a year naked and bleeding. But then again, they’re all unstable, all of them, human and demon blood mixed, lab-created or bred via natural causes, it doesn’t matter. But Roman was raised in a lab, and taught everything he knows – Dean, he suspects, was formed in a different crucible altogether. “He’s Shield, of course I know him. And again, he’s Shield, of course he’s not safe to have in the house.”

Roman shakes his head, watches the linen of the couch become muddied and bloodied, watches his expensive coat ruined, watching his husband stroke his hands over Seth’s face like he wants to carve him out of marble and set him up in the back yard, by the fountain. He’s never seen Dean look at anything like this before. Well, nothing other than when he’s got Roman tied to the bedframe and entirely at his mercy, anyway. Roman’s not sure he likes seeing that expression on Dean’s face when he’s looking at another person, his eyes soft and his shoulders relaxed.

“Do you think there’s anything left to save?” Roman asks, voice soft and quiet as Dean keeps watching the strange man, doesn’t look round to check if Roman’s still there even once, and a lesser man might take that for complacency, or for dismissal, but Dean can hear Roman breathing from three rooms away, and Roman’s always taken that as a compliment. When Dean whirls around to glare at him, Roman takes a step back, the fire in those eyes so like the feral he puts down every night that he’s got his hand in his pocket and is looking for his knives before he realises what he’s doing. Dean grins at his hand and waggles his eyebrows.

“Now, now, maybe later, lover,” he coos, making Roman’s heart leap as his arousal rises. And that’s when Seth surges off the couch and digs his claws into Dean’s chest.

 

* * *

 

Roman’s kneeling over Seth’s body in the kitchen, plain steel knives at his throat as Dean mewls curses from the living room, Seth’s naked form squirming beneath Roman’s thighs like he’s just begging to be fucked, and Roman sometimes wishes he could turn off the circuitry that means fuck or fight are always his only options. He leans down, mouth close to Seth’s ear.

“You just bled my husband. Big mistake. I don’t let anyone do that to him until the third date. No, scratch that – “ he runs his own claws down Seth’s bare chest, watching the wounds open, bleed briefly, and then begin to heal over, “ – I don’t let anyone bleed my husband but me. Especially not all over the rug. I’ll have to have the whole room replaced now; couch, carpet, the drapes you rubbed against as you tried to run…. You owe me a new fucking room, Seth.”

“Darling, are you terrorising my special ops friend?” Dean calls from the other room, and Roman rolls his eyes theatrically. Seth makes no move to suggest that he knows who either of them are, or that he’s understood anything Roman has said to him. “I’m healing slowly, watch his hands, he’s silver – “

Whatever else Dean was going to say about Seth’s apparently silver-tipped claws is drowned out by the howl Roman makes as Seth drives them into his thighs, raking them down with just enough care to miss the femoral artery, Roman can feel him deliberately not going any deeper. Roman doesn’t move, gritting his teeth.

“Yes, thank you dear, I’ve found them,” he calls back, when he thinks he can speak without screaming, and watches Dean enter the kitchen in his peripheral vision, not about to take his eyes off Seth anymore. “What lovely surprises your friends have. What else has he got, a poison dick?”

Dean laughs, and comes to crouch next to Seth’s head, leaning over him.

“Hey, Rollins, you wanna show my husband what other tricks they taught you in Shield?”

The effect is instantaneous, Seth bucking wildly, trying to get free, lifting his hands again, but Dean pins them carefully above his head. Roman tells himself it’s an unacceptable time to get hard, but then, if he were being honest, he’d have to admit he’s been hard since he got the call about the feral behind the pizza place. This is just an extra burst of arousal, because, well, there’s an attractive naked man under him, underneath the mud and blood, and his husband is pinning him, and… that sort of thing just flat does it for Roman. He might have expensive taste in almost everything else, but he likes his thrills cheap.

“Could you maybe calm him the fuck down instead of riling him up?” Roman asks, with as much patience as he can manage with his dick pressing urgently against the fly of his suit pants. Which are no doubt ruined now, with claw marks in the them. He adds those to the mental bill he’s totting up for Seth. “Just maybe?”

Dean heaves a heavy sigh.

“Fine, fine. Soldier, report,” he snaps, and Seth goes still, almost limp, but doesn’t speak. “Se - Rollins, I said, report.”

“No Shield anymore,” Seth grates out, voice still rusty with disuse. The fog seems to clear from his eyes, and he looks sideways. “Ambrose?”

Roman shoots a look at his husband, whose last name wasn’t on his official records when they got married, and who has happily been Dean Reigns for the last three years.

“Yeah, Seth, it’s me.”

Seth shakes his head.

“Can’t be. All dead. I made it happen. All dead.” He struggles a little against their hands, and then goes limp, switching off like a robot. Roman waits a moment, then gets off him, trying in vain to brush himself down. Some of the things clinging to Seth are sticky, and now they’re all over Roman’s suit. He looks down at Dean, who lets go of Seth’s arms and strokes an errant curl away from his face. Dean watches this man like he’s some sort of ethereal beauty, and Roman still can’t deny that Seth’s attractive, perhaps more so now he knows about the silver claws and the fire inside him.

“What does he mean, he made it happen?” Roman asks, and Dean’s head shoots up like it does when he’s been caught eating off the floor instead of the dinner service, or when Roman comes home early and finds him asleep in the middle of the floor, on a collection of Roman’s dirty laundry. Like he’s been caught doing something shameful, something he shouldn’t.

“Someone betrayed us,” Dean says, coldly. “We weren’t like the agency, we didn’t have government backing, not officially. Someone sold us out to them, let them know where we were and what we were weak to. Let them know that they could maybe use our training on lab creatures – “

“Dean….” Roman warns, because he’s vat-grown and he’s not about to have this taken out on him, in his own house, by his own husband, just because some overgrown pup has managed to escape death for this long. Right now, Roman’s not sure that letting Seth live is actually a kindness.

“Well, you are. They wanted our records, but they never wanted us, never wanted the street kids bred for illegal fighting rings, the ones who tore our way out of mothers’ wombs, who were never quite tame. And so someone sold us out. Seth sold us out.”

Wordlessly, Dean rolls Seth over, and stares at his back, before roughly pushing his hair off the back of his neck. Roman fingers his own scar, the marking that remained when he was taken off the tubes, and watches Dean skate his hand over a tattoo on Seth’s back. He visibly flinches when he finds the scar, exactly where Roman's is, just like the scar Dean runs his fingers over, late at night.

“Lab rat.” Dean spits, viciously, and when he looks at Roman, he goes straight back to that night, to Dean snarling at him before the knife struck him in the shoulder, the way he yelped, the way the silver burned him, burned Roman’s hands as he pulled the knife out, the way Dean had bared his sharp teeth even as Roman tried to hurt him. He takes a step back, looks down at his filthy hands.

There’s a long silence before there’s the tell-tale grunt of Dean getting to his feet, cradling his bad shoulder, the one Roman ruined, and dragging Seth upright, leaving smears of blood and ichor on the wall. Roman makes a mental note to pay the cleaner extra this week.

“Let me – “ Roman starts, and Dean pushes him away. He goes, easily. Dean’s never pushed him away before.

“We’ll be in my room. Knock if you want to come in,” Dean says, stonily, and his eyes are like two true-blue mirrors now, reflecting nothing but Roman’s own worry back at him. He’s helpless to do anything but watch as Dean hoists Seth up on his shoulders and take shim up the stairs. The sound of the door of the metal safe room Roman had hand-built for Dean opening and closing passes, and Roman rocks with it, like a blow. Dean hasn’t slept in that room for five years, hasn’t given in a look since the second month they were living together. It locks on the inside, and though Roman has a key, he’s never used it, always waited for permission. As much as he built it, it isn’t his room to enter, his to touch, his to use.

He takes a deep breath, lungs filling, and lets it out, before picking up the bottle of wine that they were going to have tonight, seven hundred dollars of thick ruby-red wine, older than most of the blood in his veins. The bottle shatters satisfyingly against the wall, and the trails of red almost wash away any trace of dirt and muck from where Seth’s body hit the wall. If Roman doesn’t look too hard, he can almost pretend he never brought the man home at all.


	3. Sapphire

Dean doesn’t come out, that Roman can see, for three days. Sure, there’s food missing, and he’s pretty sure if he checked the camera he’s got installed all over the house, he’d see something moving, here and there, in the middle of the day when anything decent with demon blood in it should be asleep. But he’s not entirely sure what Seth is, whether he’s got more secrets than those silver-tipped claws that left him knitting his skin together for almost eight hours, bleeding sluggishly on sheets with a thread count higher than the number of floors in Hell, alone and cold and hating himself for not putting the fucking creature down like the rabid dog he so clearly was. His soft heart may have won him Dean, once, but he has no clue why he decided that this feral, fell beast was something he should bring home and try to tame. He let Dean bite the hand that fed him, because it amused him, and Dean was unlikely to actually kill him, no matter how fun he felt it was to suggest it. Seth, on the other hand, is an unknown quantity, and Roman half wants to pin him down and slice under his ribcage, just to see what secrets come slithering out of something so clearly lab-made when they were still learning how to make things semi-stable.

Roman’s not stupid, for all that he can toss his hair with the arrogance of a supermodel, for all that he’s sharing his house with two cast-offs of programmes designed to create perfect killers, programmes which were decommissioned because they were too difficult to control, difficult to predict. He knows that he, too, will one day have a team sent for his dispatch, when the next generation of living weapons has some more kinks ironed out. Possibly in the literal sense, because tying arousal to violence is something they’ve never quite been able to shift out of the demon blood, no matter how hard they try.

At first, there were the ones like Dean. Dean has never said how old he is, and Roman has never asked, but the early ones, the ones who tore their way through human flesh because the demon blood was so strong within them, that goes back nearly a thousand years, to a time when human and demon mixed freely, because the consequences were unknown. Once someone figured out they could weaponise the children, they decided that losing valuable hosts each time was a waste, and it was easier to breed the children in vats, lab-grown, with each generation stronger, faster, less volatile in ways the agency didn’t like, less likely to bleed each other for fun. When Roman looks at Dean, he can see hundreds of years of freedom, and he wonders what Dean sees in his. Three hundred years of refining bloodlines and checking chemicals, maybe, and Roman still has to go to the clinic every six months for injections and blood tests, just to check he’s not quietly going insane while they’re not watching him.

The bedroom is dark when he wakes, trying to work out what sent him from peacefully asleep to on high alert in seconds. He smells Seth before he sees him, something like brimstone and blood and a trace of metal, and then he seems to melt out of the darkness, standing by the bed. There’s something wrong with the air behind him, and it takes Roman a moment to work out that those are wings, there’s wings sprouting from Seth’s shoulder blades, leathery and black, and dripping with ichor.

“What did you do to Dean?” he asks, voice croaky with being awoken, and fear. He knows Dean can take care of himself, but if Seth has wings and silver-tipped claws, what else might he have to take down Dean? There are stories of poisoned breath, of sleep spells, of all the ways a monster can hurt a man, and most days, Dean is more monster than anyone Roman knows – but here, with Seth in front of him, he worries. There are three sets of knives within easy reach, one silver, one iron, one plain steel, but… Roman realises the air in the room is cold, the sheets chilly against his bare skin, which means someone’s changed the heat settings. Dean is lucky, he can work in most temperatures, but Roman’s improved stability came with a susceptibility to cold, and he feels sluggish, slow. He doesn’t know if he’ll beat Seth to the knives.

“Dean?” Roman calls, hoping that his lover will hear him from wherever he is in the house, but he doesn’t take his eyes off Seth, listening to the noise of the ichor dripping onto the carpet, and the low growling noise Seth is making in the back of his throat. “Your friend is loose.”

Seth draws a ragged breath that sounds like air through gravel, and takes another step towards the bed, until he’s close enough that Roman can see the flesh hanging off his ribs, just how skinny he is, the way his chest rises and falls with what looks like obvious effort. He needs antibiotics, a bath, and a good meal. All things Roman would be happy to provide if he just knew where Dean was, and if he’s alright.

“Seth, I need you to tell me where Dean is,” Roman says, a last-ditch attempt to get some sense out of the fucking feral creature he brought home and who is ruining his life.

“All dead.” Seth says, in a voice which speaks of pits and flames, something no one could ever mistake for fully human. “All dead. All gone. I made it happen.”

Roman is off the bed, a silver knife in each hand, burning into his palms, before Seth can react at all, but he staggers back when Roman shoves both of them down to the hilt in his chest, looking down as if stunned by the pain and the pressure. Roman doesn’t give him a chance to recover, just sprints down the hall, fumbling for the key around his neck, with his dog tags, the key to Dean’s safe room.

He doesn’t need it, the door is already ajar, and Dean’s lying on the floor, twitching slightly. There’s no blood, no injury Roman can see when he crouches down next to him, and presses a hand to his skin. It’s still warm, he’s not dead yet. There’s a sound from the doorway behind him, and Roman whirls around to see Seth, chest wounds already healed, holding both knives as they drip blood. He doesn’t seem to flinch away from the silver at all, and Roman wonders if this is how he dies, if this is what the end of the world looks like, crouched over Dean’s body as something genetically created to murder does its job.

“He fell,” Seth says, and his voice is still fire, and the pit, and the shrieks of the dead, but this time, Roman can hear it for what it is. Worry. Dean’s had these falls before, when the heat breaks, or when he’s stressed, these twitching little fits that come from being a product of biology and not the lab.

“Dean, can you hear me?” Roman asks, and Dean opens those true blue eyes, and stares up at him.

“Ro?” Dean says, sounding lost, and far away. “Why is Seth bleeding?”

Roman doesn’t have a good answer, so he just kisses Dean, and hopes that, eventually, he’ll be forgiven.


End file.
